THE TRIUMPH OF THE ROLY POLYS: AN EXPERT ON THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE AWARDS ACCOLADESby Charles Carreon03/06/15

People called them different things — sowbugs, pillbugs, roly polys, potato bugs. The little black, armored bugs that ball up and pretend to be dead when you touch them. They’re a pretty low form of life, but they’d make perfect Netizens, according to Sam Biddle, the fallen Gawker tech punditwho took a “sabbatical” last year before Christmas after his tweet urging a resurgence of online bullying fell on many thousands of irritated ears connected to fingers that went to work clicking his demise.

What is it with so-called “intelligent” boys these days? It’s hard to tell what’s gotten into them, but it sure as hell looks like the devil. And it’s not the ones who look tough, like this punked-up guy with red hair and a peace sign on his sleeve I just saw walking south on Highway 1 in Half Moon Bay. Like as not, he doesn’t post rape jokes or sexually offensive comments about his teacher on Yik Yak. Since the young man I just saw walking by in black and metal punk regalia is probably not going to any college or university, he probably doesn’t even care about Yik Yak, a Twitter-clone that posts all tweets anonymously from a limited geographic area and has taken the male populations of the nation’s college campuses by storm.

An Ideal App for Adolescent Bullshitters

The main use for Yik Yak is to build a group-think, conformist mentality amongst those hordes of little twits marinating in self-indulgent leisure for four years, fucking off, pretending that they’re hooking up with hotties in the dorms instead of mating with their palms in the shower, and Yik Yakking their life away while their parents think they’re taking notes in lecture class. We used to call it “getting a liberal education,” but there’s nothing liberal about the attitude of many undergraduates, if a recent article in the New York Times has got its facts right.

Students Free to Virtually-Rape Their Teachers at UGA

It was quite a shock to Margaret Crouch when she discovered what a number of anonymous little shitbags in her class were Yik Yakking about. We didn’t actually get to see their nasty comments and attacks on her character that were happening in real time while she attempted to deliver a lecture of educational significance, but we are so familiar with this kind of disgusting drek because of its wide circulation beyond the confines of Yik Yak, that we can easily infer how terrifying, disgusting, and stomach-turning it must have been for this professor.

Unfortunately, Crouch attends the University of Gutless Administrators (“UGA”), also known as EasternMichiganUniversity, who apparently couldn’t find their lawyer, or took their advice on controlling their students from the Free Hate Speech Mafia. As the New York Times put it, “After all, it would take a lawsuit, a subpoena, and some interest in standing behind professors to hire a lawyer to file a lawsuit or serve a subpoena.” Oh, gee! A subpoena! UGA just can’t do that.

EmoryUniversity had a different take on it, and blocked Yik Yak from their servers. The New York Times suggests this is an exercise in futility since students can access it on their wireless plan. So at least the Yik Yak Yuck Fucks have to pay for the goddamned data, and they have to consider whether it’s worth a few cents to rape their professors during class at Emory. At Phillips of Exeter, Mark Zuckerberg’s alma mater, where the elite of the nation are moved out of their middle school Pampers and into full-size adult Attends, the use of Yik Yak became so horrifying and out of hand that the headmaster banned it.

Policing Speech Is Easily Done When It’s Negative Speech About the Police

It is well known that the FBI, like schools, attempt almost nothing at all when faced by speech attacks on ordinary citizens, such as the numerous death threats that have been issued to Michael Moore by celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly. Institutions constantly claim that they are powerless when death threats are presented against participants and their activities, such as the gamergate threats against Brianna Wu, that the PAX show refused to take seriously. Just like UGA, unable to think of a way to protect a teacher from its students’ verbal savagery.

But we well know that when the shoe is on the other foot, and someone spits a spitwad in the direction of the FBI, the police, or some government figure with a little clout, they shortly find that their IP address has been traced, their anonymity has been ripped off, and they are dealing with a bunch of guys in black ballistic suits carrying automatic rifles who take the computer and its owner down to the station for a little chat that leads, ultimately, to a plea bargain in federal court.

It’s just a question of whose ox is gored. Women just need to start goring some oxen up on Capitol Hill. It might not take a car caravan of angry women circling the Beltway honking their horns and demanding protection from virtual rape, but then again, why not try it?

Elliot Rodger and the Vengeful Victim

So much for what’s wrong with the schools and the cops. But the boys have created themselves, and must be the primary focus of criticism. Why do young men heap shit on women and indulge prolonged fantasies of sexually-tinged revenge? Thanks to Elliot Rodger, who killed the sorority blondes he lusted after because they would not open their hearts to him, and killed himself because he couldn’t bear the humiliation of being unsexed any longer, we have plenty of insight into this problem from the viewpoint of boys who perceive themselves as the victims of womankind.

Elliot was obsessed with bedding a woman because he believed what the media told him thousands of times since he first starting watching TV and movies — the only guy who is a man is the one who can get a girl to part her thighs. Despite his earnest efforts and reasonable belief that he was as good-looking, articulate, and well-heeled as his peers, he believed he was starving sexually while his cohorts were feasting on luscious lovelies. I suspect his perceptions were out of sync with reality.

While sex at UCSB might be happening all over the place, Elliot was probably less deprived than he thought, compared with other young men. Sexual frustration is a substantial component of the adolescent male life, and almost all boys suffer from it. Sexual frustration accounts for substitutive behavior such as gay sex, compulsive use of pornography, and, now that Yik Yak has empowered them to do it, the pleasures of conducting a virtual gangbang. I once remember talking to a therapist who had worked in Washington state, not the city. He told me that the kind of folks he had been treating in court-ordered therapy would get together in bars and give each other positive feedback for incest and other sick predatory sexual behavior. Groupthink developed in real time using Yik Yak encourages young men to think that they have a legitimate complaint against women, and therefore the right to revenge themselves upon them.

Yik Yak Abuse: A Leading Indicator for Future Sex Predators

Indeed, if you could identify the type of Yik Yakkers who are engaging in the most violent verbal behavior, you might find some people who will later in life turn into someone like Elliot Rodger. If they can commit verbal crimes with impunity, the desire to commit physical crimes with impunity will certainly arise as well.

Speech, of course, is the precusor for action, as the military has long known. Training for warfare develops the ability to see the enemy as merely a target for violence and death. Violent speech leads to violent action, because “as a man thinketh…”

But the boys will tell you they’re just having a good time, and if their mothers or fathers saw what they are Yik Yakking about, they would explain that it’s just the sort of thing that boys do these days, and even though it looks outrageous, it doesn’t mean they are headed in the same direction as Elliot Rodger. But they don’t know that for sure. They don’t know what they’re turning into, because these boys are not alright.

The media insists on saying that communication is just communication, and the load of frivolous, meaningless, merely entertaining communication swells every day. Every day people are asked to believe that more and more free-hate-speech is the wave of the future, and that they are just old fuddy duddies who are not getting it. Yes, Hollywood can tell you that it doesn’t matter how many murders a kid sees, it will never turn him toward violence, and that no matter how many times people see problems solved by putting a bullet in someone’s brain, that it will never cause some kid to put a bullet in somebody’s brain. But a lot of bullets are turning up in brains in this country, and the media is not accepting responsibility for any of it. This is kind of strange, given that the media is well aware of the power of pornography, and during the second world war, the first world war particularly, actively engaged in disseminating racist caricatures and incitements to brutal violence against Asian peoples that ultimately culminated in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, two astoundingly cruel, brutalizations of nearly half a million Japanese people, accomplished by the decision of a single pathetic mediocrity, Harry S. Truman, who apparently wanted to kill more people than Hitler had even attempted to kill in one day.

Words count. The boys are not alright, because the words they eat like Fruitloops and Cheerios are toxic. Their souls, what they have left of them, are severely corrupted. If any of them are reading this, I trust that they will see their image in the mirror I am holding up, and be disgusted, as the rest of the decent world is. They have no legitimate membership in our society, and should all be considered Elliots in the making until they are safely in their graves.

Ron was not happy. Not happy at all. He was staring at the hole in his dashboard, and he just could not believe it. The windows weren't broken, the doors were still locked the way he'd left them before he started his shift. It was broad daylight. Out loud he breathed the words, "Where's my fucking stereo?" A frown was holding his face prisoner, and it tightened its grip as he reached out and said, "What the hell is this?"

"This" was a wispy piece of iridescent paper, or maybe it was metal, about half the width of a stick of gum, and twice as long. Again he said, "What the hell?" as he flipped on the dome light to give it a closer look.

As he did, it stiffened in his fingers and a gleam ran down its length. Then a string of words began flowing across the surface. The words were ... well he couldn't remember them exactly when he tried to later, but it was essentially something like,

"Dear Ron,

Your car stereo has not been stolen. You have been selected for a special experiment. Your car stereo has been displaced to a null space, and as a result, a village of 600 people has been spared from destruction. Should you want your stereo back, it will be necessary to displace the village. To make your choice, you need do nothing. The same process that initiated this special experiment will effect its return."

Ron felt a surge of anger, possessiveness. He had really been enjoying his car stereo, and so had his girlfriend. He could put the old one back in. Geez. He stared at the strip of metal that had stopped displaying text and was getting wispy again.

He stared out the windshield, seeing a village in his mind, drowned at the bottom of a lake someplace in China. He didn't know why he thought that. The note hadn't said anything about China. He went to look at it again. There was nothing between his fingertips. Oh my god. He felt dizzy for a second, like maybe he was losing it, and stuck his hand into the empty space, feeling loose wires. "It's still gone," he said. And he knew why.

Luann didn't even mention when she played the old stereo that he reinstalled. It was weird, almost as if she didn't remember him getting it, or the big deal he'd made about the increase in tonal range the new amp had, with digital fuzzy logic and ... and he realized he didn't miss it at all. Things were going better with Luann, in fact, and maybe it was because he spent less time talking about electronics stuff. He chuckled to himself. Fuckin' crazy shit. "Special experiment. Scammers ... pranksters...." occasionally he wasn't sure, but he couldn't bring himself to test it, to say, "I want my stereo back! Drown the village." No, no. He didn't want to risk it. He did not want his stereo back that bad, or maybe, he realized, at all.

Ron was looking at Luann's books -- pictures of coral reefs and fishing villages. Luann was making lunch in the kitchen. They'd gotten married about a year before, and on the weekends she liked to cook, and Ron liked to dream about places they could get away to. He called out to Luann, "We should go see some of these places."

"We can't," she replied.

"Why not?"

"Because they're all gone. Drowned by rising seas. Even before that, the coral reefs were killed by rising acid levels."

Ron looked at the cover of the book. It was called "Hidden Paradises," by a couple of photographers. A husband and wife team. Their picture was on the back standing on a dock in some jungle with a pontoon airplane floating next to them. Ron envied them in every fiber of his being. They looked relaxed, satisfied, energized. Just like I'd like to feel, said Ron to himself. He checked the date on the book -- 2018. "I hadn't realized this book was so old," he said to Luann, as he got up off the couch and walked into the kitchen, looking at the couple on the back again. "Why didn't our parents give a shit?"

"It's hard," said Luann. "They were pursuing a dream, right? Isn't that what they taught us in school? The American Dream was unsustainable and toxic? Now sustainability is our path."

"Too bad we couldn't have taken it by choice," answered Ron. He went back to the couch. Their only window was next to it.

That night he had a dream. He was playing poker, and he got a royal flush. Everyone around the table was looking at him with amazement as he fanned the cards out on the felt. He was about to reach out and scoop the pot, that was stacked with cash, gold, jewels, a king's ransom, it looked like. Then he looked across the table, and there was a little girl in a threadbare muslin dress, looking wan and pale and hungry, and as she looked at him, he saw that she was one of a great crowd behind her, all hungry, all silent, all pleading without breathing a sound. Then suddenly a clock started ringing, and he looked up on the wall and there was a clock there, and both hands were pointed straight up. He awoke with a dry mouth.

After that, the special experiment resumed, and picked up speed. One day it was his new car, reduced to a scooter, with a little silver wisp hanging off the right-side mirror. It was a nice scooter, and his car was worth a lot -- it displaced a huge slum outside of Rio de Janeiro, and replaced a six square mile swath of Amazonian forest, and several villages of forest dwellers with unique language, culture, and pharmacological wisdom.

He got into the game, wondering what the experiment would hawk next, and how much he'd get for it. From the news, he could see the world becoming a much nicer place to live, but he didn't need the news to see it. The results were all over the neighborhood. For one thing, there was a neighborhood. In the evening, you could hear people calling their kids home for supper, screen doors slamming, and smell dinner aromas drifting across the way. Bicycles were everywhere, and cars rarely seen. Less car accidents, for sure. Strangely, he hadn't heard of a war, anywhere, in years. That was so weird. He tried to remember some of the wars. Like there was one in the desert for so long. Religious thing, or maybe an oil thing. He just couldn't remember.

The years went by, and he never told anyone what was happening. He knew he couldn't be the only participant in the special experiment, and he could tell it was going well, very well indeed. But no one talked about it. No one said, "I'm saving the world one displaced commodity at a time."

But that's how it was. Gradually, even the neighborhood thinned out, and he and Luann decided to move closer to the beach. There were a number of places available, and rent was low. They didn't worry about buying the place. Nobody seemed to worry about buying a place anymore.

About a month after they moved in, all of Ron's automotive tools disappeared, along with the scooter he'd had for years ever since his car disappeared. Now the scooter was gone. He walked into the garage, and whoa, it was a stable. Hmm, he recognized the horse, and it recognized him. He had an apple for it right in his pocket. He fed it to him, and rubbed his head under the forelock. "Whatta ya say, boy? Shall we saddle up for a ride later?" Rusty, that was the horse's name, pawed the ground lightly and whinnied with a soft head shake in reply.

After dinner, the sun went down red over the sea, and he and Luann sat in woven chairs seeing the world tinged with passionate rose light.

As the sun winked behind the coral atoll offshore, a pod of dolphins broke through the glassy surface of the sea, spreading ripples across the waves. Ron held Luann's hand gently. He looked forward to losing so much more.